Installed Windows w/boot camp and now I only get a gray screen

Mac book Pro
Problem : borked boot camp install and now I only get a gray screen.
Installed new hard drive as i was running low with tiger and xp installed . Installed tiger without a hitch , improved performance was extremely pleased . Then tried installing boot camp and this is where it all turned into a nightmare.
Like an idiot I did not realize that i had an xp disc with only sp1 installed instead of the needed sp2 .
Was installing boot camp 1.4 i believe until i could afford to buy leopard . Partitioned the hard drive , formatted the widow partition ntfs as it is a 320 gig hard drive . Restarted after format process and kept looping in the system files install for xp which it seemed to work as all the files were copied but when it restarted to install the OS it would start again copying the system files . At this time still was not aware i had inserted the sp 1 disc instead of the sp2 slip streamed disc. Then the catastrophe struck Power outage (have the worst possible power supplier in the country ) the disc tried two more times to install as I did not know why the heck it would not install . Anyways after that it died and without any power source until power was restored.

Upon restarting it after power was restored the only thing I could come up with was a gray screen. If i tried to boot from original mac osx dvd nothing , gray screen . So i put the xp disc back in and started the machine while holding down the c key in an effort to boot from the xp disc(now the one with sp2) and eventually a windows disc would appear with the arrow below . When choosing or clicking on the arrow it would choose the "windows" disc but shortly afterword everything would freeze. Gray screen comes up with no other response .

What i have tried
resetting the pram to no avail
boot from either disc xp or osx nothing except on one occasion with the osx disc inserted it showed just an arrow then froze .
boot from safe mode no avail

I am at a loss and open to any suggestions at this point .
thanks in advance
Wrath

Bootcamp is a Leopard application?

Where can i download boot camp for tiger? - Mac Forums

correct

Your correct it now is only available with leopard , I had it from a while back but it is beta and has been removed from apples website

Personally I think you may be well and truly screwed here. If you can get a Leopard disk you might try booting from that. But if it won't boot from your Tiger disk there's not much you can do here except possibly to reformat the entire drive and try to reinstall Tiger from there.

Good luck

Yeah i think your right unfortunately but not having an understanding of mac's sub system I am at a loss of what might possibly be reset in order to boot from a disc or OS .

Being a system builder (windows machines) for a long time I am familiar with the bios of a windows machine. And if experiencing a similar problem it would only take a reset of the bios to get back to a boot able machine. So i am baffled on what a mac boots from or loads the initial input output from ? How does a mac know how to boot , or what devices are contained in the machine itself ?

Its almost like it is stuck between trying to load the windows boot and osx as it will recognize the windows disc but wont boot from it.



I still have the hard drive it came with it just trying to avoid the daunting task of removing the existing one , installing the old one in order to format the newer hard drive only to have to physically reinstall it again . I would have to purchase an adapter to hook it up to one of my pc's to reformat probably with symatec's partitioning program as it allows you to format a drive with macs file system hfs or whatever its called cant remember it right now . But this may have to be my last ditch effort to save this machine unless apple has a way to do it without removing the existing hard drive in order to format it . But here once again my lack of understanding apples sub system if it exist comes into play.

One last question , Why would you think that a leopard disc might provide a boot in relation to a tiger disc ? Is there a difference in the two as far as booting from the disc ?

thanks once again
Wrath

I think it's just a long shot worth trying, that's all. I think you should go back and swap the drives as you indicate.

Cheers

thanks mate I had believed so and long shots are by all means welcome as opposed to ripping this thing apart again , what a pain as opposed to the many windoze laptops i have replaced hard drives in . Two screws, a hard drive sled then pop it back in as opposed as to having to completely disassemble the thing with all the tiny micro screws ( I have huge working hands ) and the snapping in or out the logic board after having removed all the screws . Oh well thanks again mate .

Fixed it !

Well after a few months got tired of not having my MPB and cracked her open again . Lesson for me MACS are extremely Bi Polar .

What i ended up doing was to remove the hard drive and attach to a device that allows you to connect to a host machine (all ide /sata ect.) through a usb cable . Sure enough it was partitioned so I had to reformat it HFS (cost me $30 bucks for a wonderful program paragon partition master) I don't have any other macs in the house so it was well worth the $30
.
Reinstalled the hard drive (by far the most difficult part and ridiculous to just replace a hard drive) and she booted up from the OSX dvd ! Ok really excited now cant tell you how many times i tried every conceivable option prior a hundred times. But soon my emotions went awry , the hard drive was red crap all this for nothing . But all i needed to do was to erase the drive , which i did and TAA DAA OSX installed without a hitch .

Happy as a pig in shite everything works beautifully . Got my new sporty 7200 rpm 16 meg cache 320 gig hard drive working like a charm . Headed out to apple store later to pick up a copy of snow leopard and start my windoze install again , except this time with the right software including the RIGHT xp disc with SP2 !

Been doing a lot of support work on other laptops all Windoze and man I forgot how sexy this MPB is ! Nice machine , os ect.....

thanks everyone
Wrath